I just re-read some of the things that I wrote about the New York Dolls in June, and while most of it is OK, I think I was a little unclear in regard to their musicianship. Their playing, even now, is hard to describe. It contains a lot of energy, and a lot of blues and fifties-rock knowledge, but it's made up of jagged edges. Of course, smoothness was the last thing they were trying for - like many great artists they were interested in shaking an audience up, and they did it really well. Famously, they were proclaimed the best and the worst new group of 1973 by a Creem magazine poll. They were polarizing, in other words, just like their offspring, punk rock, would be a few years later. But it was clear to me, then and now, which side was right. The late, great Frankie Venom (frontman for Teenage Head) put it succinctly: "If you don't like the Dolls, you're not hip." Amen.

If there's a song that captures all of their qualities, it has to be "Personality Crisis", the first track from New York Dolls (1973) - where Johansen's opening seemed to foreshadow the reaction of the world: "Waaaaaaoo/ Yeah, yeah, yeah / Oh no no no no, no no no no/ Ow"

That says it all.